Mark Career as Spam

July 24, 2013

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Fair warning: Tomorrow I travel in the morning to hit the CFI Student Leadership Conference at the Meatball Mothership, so there may not be a Morning Heresy. If there is one, it will likely be short, rushed, and rife with errors. So other than being short, it will closely resemble the usual Heresy.

Alan Turing, the guy who pretty much gave us computing, and who helped us beat the Nazis by decrypting the Enigma code, will be posthumously pardoned by the UK. What'd he do in the first place? Well, he was gay.

Speaking of Turing, who better to play him in a movie than CUMBERBAAAATCH?

Theologian J. Cameron Carter says a kind of "atheism" to the "god of America" is the only reasonable response to the Zimmerman verdict:

[M]ore than just deputizing himself to act with police power (and this is the crucial point of Dr. Butler’s reflections), he deputized himself to stand in the place of god, to act in god’s name and with divine or sovereign power (remember Zimmerman’s words to Sean Hannity that shooting Trayvon Martin was “God’s will”), and finally, not just to act as god but to be a god, a god who could judge and act with the power of life and death—or more accurately, with the power of death and under the protection of law. . . . What I’m in effect calling for is a Christianity uncoupled from this nation-state project, from the project of social purity or “proper” Americanness, with its (racially inflected) legal protocols and its vision of racialized criminality and institutions of incarceration.

The vast majority of scientists accept that evolution is real, that man-made climate change is occurring and that vaccines do not cause autism. But in the general public, these issues are often hotly debated, and, too often, the media fuels these arguments by airing junk science as though it were legitimate. The result? A major public health risk. Vaccine avoidance makes the entire country more susceptible to diseases like the measles that were once vanquished. By giving science deniers a public forum, media outlets implicitly condone their claims as legitimate.

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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul, Ed, Lauren, anyone who can fire them, or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.

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Paul Fidalgo has been communications director of the Center for Inquiry since 2012. He holds a master’s degree in political management from George Washington University, and has worked previously for FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy and the Secular Coalition for America. Paul is also an actor and musician whose work includes five years performing with the American Shakespeare Center. He lives in Maine with his wife and kids. His blog at the Patheos network is iMortal, and he tweets at @paulfidalgo.